


imagine being loved by me

by dangercupcake



Series: Superstition Fanwork [20]
Category: Original Work, Superstition by Superstition_hockey
Genre: Flirting, Flirting through mix tapes, Hockey players love gay shit, M/M, Parallels, Sophomore year of hockey, Well flirting through Spotify playlists, a story told through implication, queerness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:40:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23681770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dangercupcake/pseuds/dangercupcake
Summary: G and Jacks flirt through playlists.
Relationships: Claude Giroux/Original Male Character(s), Oliver Jackson (Superstition)/Claude Giroux
Series: Superstition Fanwork [20]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1724128
Comments: 8
Kudos: 50





	imagine being loved by me

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Other People](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10739070) by [Superstition_hockey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Superstition_hockey/pseuds/Superstition_hockey). 



G tosses Jacks his phone, and Jacks has the weirdest sense memory of his first year with the Flyers, first day on the way to the rink, when G tossed Jacks his phone and told him to find a playlist he liked.

“Find a playlist,” grunts G, and Jacks has to suppress wild, inappropriate giggles.

The fingerprint from the middle finger of his left hand still works to unlock G’s phone.

Fair. Jacks hasn’t taken G’s fingerprint off his phone either. Although, to be _excruciatingly fair_ , Jacks has the folder with Grindr and Snapchat and every picture he has of Chants shirtless or naked (even the ones he downloaded from the Sharks’ website) fingerprint locked to only his fingerprint.

Jacks is pretty sure—no, actually, there is _no way_ G has fingerprint locked pictures of Ryanne on his phone. Jacks is the one who showed G how fingerprint locking worked in the first place, after too many times when G changed the passcode and didn’t give the new one to Jacks and then left him in the car with shitty music playing.

But Jacks isn’t looking through G’s phone for nudes of Ryanne _anyway_ , and G probably knows it, so—so whatever, Jacks needs to find a playlist. All the ones from last year are buried under new shit. “Ryanne Summer 20--" and “Danny Your Music Taste Still Sucks” and “Caelan Never Forget!!!” and G’s local copy of the new Hozier. Jacks almost plays that but right below it is “Jackson Summer 20--": the playlist G had sent him the link for at the beginning of August.

He plays that instead. It’s full of early 2000s country and folk, some in English, some in French. He’d loved it, actually, although more because G had made it for him than because the songs are all that great, even though some of them are, actually, great.

“Good choice.” G nods along with the beat, but doesn’t sing, so he’s not feeling as shitty as he looks. Not that anything happened except a weird look on his face when he’d told Jacks, “Ryanne told me to bring you home for dinner tonight,” but . . . it was weird.

“Yeah, I loved this playlist, listened to it all month,” he replies, and leans his head on the door of the truck as the fiddle picks up.

“Ryanne played this song for me the first night she stayed over,” G says when the next song starts up. He doesn’t look at Jacks, which Jacks knows because he whips his head around to look at G. 

“Yeah?” asks Jacks cautiously.

“Yeah.” G doesn’t add anything to that, though. 

\--

Jacks sleeps over in his old room, and when he wakes up there’s a stack of clean clothes on the dresser. Too big to be G’s. Too big to be anyone’s, really, but they’re not Jacks’s. He puts them on anyway; they smell clean and look clean, so maybe G just has generic clothes hanging around for when teammates come over. He didn’t used to, but probably more people are going to get drunk with him this year, now that Jacks is gone.

Breakfast is a smoothie from the fridge and a banana from the bowl and four hard boiled eggs from the Tupperware and he’s out of the house before anyone else wakes up. 

He doesn’t have a hangover exactly, but he doesn’t feel great. He uses the “Chants cure”: run. Chants’s cure for everything starts with a run. Jacks hates the world the entire time, but once he’s back at his apartment stretching out, and then taking a long hot shower, he has to admit he feels better.

Chants checks in around noon, which Jacks assumes means he thought Jacks was hung over in bed after a Saturday night with no game and a Sunday without one too, since Chants is usually up before the sun on the West Coast. Jacks sends him a snap of his hand around his dick, skin still smooth from his beginning of the season wax job that he thinks might become an annual tradition just from how easy it makes the entire rest of his life when he’s not worried about his pubes getting caught anywhere (including in the mouths of hookups) and how much better it is for Grindr shots that keep him unidentifiable.

“Miss that red hair” Chants texts back, and Jacks snorts.

He gets another text right on top of that one. From G, though. So not about his pubes, probably.

It’s a Spotify link. It takes Jacks to—the same playlist G had shared with him over the summer?

But no, there are a few differences; this one doesn’t have any Gillian Welch or Patty Griffin, Jacks notices immediately. And it’s almost 90 minutes, where the one from the summer was only a little over an hour. But so many of the songs are the same.

It takes an embarrassing amount of time for Jacks to notice the name of the playlist.

Ryanne 2012

Jacks fingers go numb but he manages to google “Ryanne Giroux 2012” and find a Philly Voice article that says in the summary on the search page, right there for anyone to see, that G and Ryanne met in 2012.

This is a playlist G made for Ryanne the year they met.

And G mined it for songs to send to Jacks.

Jacks breathes through his nose and shuts his eyes.

“come over tonight” says the next text from G, too many minutes later.

“ok” Jacks sends back, without even thinking about it. 

It takes a while, but finally Jacks sends G the link to his own playlist—one he’d made for Honoré sophomore year of high school. 

“you will hate every song on this” he types. “i made it for my hs boyfriend”

“why is it called ride a unicorn into battle”

“youll understand when u listen”

“i don’t want to listen the first song sucks”

“sorry every song cant be tanglewood tree bro”

“you really wanna call me bro right now???????????”

“sorry every song cant be tanglewood tree loverrrrrrrr”

“you’re gonna be sorry kid”

“you really wanna call me kid right now???????????”

Jacks copies and pastes to make sure he gets the exact same number of question marks G had put. His heart is leaping. His fingers are still numb. His toes are tingling.

Before he leaves for G’s that night, he makes sure to shave closely. He takes a snap for Chants and captions it “getting some” and Chants immediately sends back “don’t stay out too late u have a game tmrw mon chum”.

Jacks is warm all over. He listens to “Tanglewood Tree” as he drives over to G and Ryanne’s.

**Author's Note:**

> I was listening to "Tanglewood Tree" on repeat 1
> 
> Here is a great video of it:  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Niia1u4vp0I
> 
> And I sent the link to the video with this text:
> 
> _I need to write a story about Jacks looking through Giroux's spotify account and finding this song on a mix he made for Ryanne 20 years ago and ALSO on a mix he made for jacks last year._
> 
> _and he said to jacks, this is a bunch of old songs I think you might like_
> 
> _not, "more than half these songs are what i put on a mix for my wife when we first started dating."_
> 
> _i will tag it "hockey players love gay shit"_


End file.
